Friday, 12 September 2014

Read in 2014 - 32: Autobiographical Sketches

Annie Wood Besant’s
„Autobiographical Sketches“ were published in 1885 with the purpose of
“…satisfy[ing] friendly questioners and […] as defence against unfair
attack.” As I had not previously come across the author, not even
heard her name, I had no idea what “friendly questioners” would have
liked to know about her, and why she feared “unfair attack”. So, my
curiosity wide awake, I began to read.

Annie Wood was born in 1847.
She describes her parents as having an extraordinarily
loving marriage. One of little Annie’s first memories is of waking up on
the morning of her 4th birthday,
proudly exclaiming “Papa! Mamma! I’m four
years old!”. Sadly, her father died only a year later, leaving her
mother penniless and in charge of Annie and her older brother. To make
ends meet, they started to run a boarding house for
boys from a nearby school, but still money was so tight that Annie was
handed over to a rich friend of her mother’s for further education. It
must have been hard for the mother to send her daughter away, because
the two of them were very close (and remained
so until the mother’s death many years later), but she also knew that
Annie would be in very good hands with her friend.

Now leading a rather
luxurious life of studies and travels all across Europe, Annie developed
a deep passion for knowledge, at the same time becoming religious to
the extreme. At 20, she married Frank Besant, a vicar
– not because she loved the man, but because she loved the idea of
being a clergyman’s wife. To her, it was the next best thing to being a nun. In
her book, Mrs. Besant does not speak much about what her marriage was
actually like, but the fact alone that her husband
is rarely mentioned over the years that follow (in spite of the two of
them having two children together and Annie being very much involved in
community and church work) is telling.

During those years, Annie still
used as much of her precious personal time
as she could for personal study, mainly of religious and philosophical
books, and of the Bible. It was then that she discovered discrepancies to
what she had been taught and firmly believed until then all her life.

She did not want to give up
her faith or openly rebel against anything or anyone – all she was
looking for was knowledge and truth. She spoke to learned men, clericals
and others, always hoping to have her former faith
restored. But it was not to be, and eventually Annie realized she could
not honestly partake anymore in Holy Communion at the church where her husband
was vicar. This caused a rift so seriously between the couple that they
separated.

Annie as a young woman

Annie took her young daughter
with her (the boy already being away at boarding school) and lived on
the meagre allowance from her husband and whatever money she could earn
with jobs such as nursing the children of wealthy
families.

Now that she had a greater
degree of independence, she studied even more, eventually becoming a
prominent speaker for the National Secular Society. She spoke and wrote
about all sorts of subjects from religion to women’s
rights to free thought and birth control. She was prosecuted and had to
appear in court several times on charges such as having published an
“obscene” book (about birth control, written by a medical doctor), and
in the following years sadly lost the case against
her husband who managed to take her daughter from her on the grounds
that she was unfit for taking care of the girl with all those
“unwholesome” things going on in her life.

For several chapters, the
book now goes into much detail regarding the legal battle around the
publication of the “obscene” book (and other works); committees are
listed down to the very last name, court scenes are described
and whole articles appearing in “The Reformer” are copied. These parts I
must admit to having only quick-scanned, not read word for word. I was
more interested in the general outcome, which was that freedom of
thought and press were eventually confirmed and
Annie Besant continued her work.

The book ends with her
expressing hope of being reunited with her daughter when the girl would
be old enough to decide for herself, a hope that came true according to
what I found on Wikipedia. She was 38 when she wrote
her “Autobiographical Sketches” and lived until 1933, so there was a
lot more to come. I found the Wikipedia article about her very
interesting; it is also from there that I have taken the pictures of
Annie Besant.

Annie at 50

Something I found very
interesting – because I have never thought about the subject in that way
– is what she writes about her reasons for loving the work as a nurse:

I think Mother Nature meant me for a nurse, for I take a sheer delight in nursing anyone, provided only
that there is peril in the sickness, so that there is the strange and solemn feeling of the struggle between the
human skill one wields and the supreme enemy, Death. There is a strange fascination in fighting Death, step by
step, and this is of course felt to the full where one nghts for life as life, and- not for a life one loves. When the
patient is beloved, the struggle is touched with agony, but where one fights with Death over the body of a stranger,
there is a weird enchantment in the contest without personal pain, and as one forces back the hated foe there is a curious
triumph in the feeling which marks the death-grip yielding up its prey, as one snatches back to earth the life which
had well-nigh perished.

This was a fascinating glimpse at a section of not only one woman's life, but also the society in which she lived, and the contradictions she herself didn't even recognize as such. For instance, even at her very poorest (she does not have enough to eat proper meals every day, and her rooms lack even the most basic furniture until someone donates a few pieces), she employs a housemaid, the thought of doing all of her own housework herself apparently never crossing her mind. But aren't we all a bit like that, having facets to our thinking and our characters that contrast with each other, sometimes to the point of being opposites? I enjoyed reading this short autobiography, and possibly part of the enjoyment came from not knowing anything about the author beforehand and not having the slightest idea of what direction her life was going to take.